[Haskell-cafe] Getting some funny brackets in Haddock docs

[Matt]

An extremely common complaint about Haskell coming from other languages is
the proliferation of un-Googleable operators and symbols. I would be
unhappy to see these changes made, especially as the fancy brackets aren't
valid code (and thus can't be Hoogled or copy/pasted). I suspect that every
non-maintainer of the containers documentation would need to look these
symbols up every time they consulted the documentation, as the
documentation would likely be the only place they're used.

The `fromList` calls are perhaps a little noisy -- having literal syntax
like Python's for maps and sets would be nice, but that's probably not
going to fly given that `containers` isn't part of `base` or the Report.

Matt Parsons

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 9:08 PM, Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com>
wrote:

> On 01/09/2018 05:55 PM, David Feuer wrote:
> > The containers Haddock documentation currently represents sequences,
> > sets, and maps via the relevant `fromList` function. For example,
> > Data.Map gives the example
> >
> >   findWithDefault 'x' 1 (fromList [(5,'a'), (3,'b')]) == 'x'
> >
> > I find these `fromList` calls exceedingly distracting, and I think
> > they obscure the key ideas. Of course, I *could* just specify at the
> > top that the documentation assumes OverloadedLists, but I think that's
> > likely to be somewhat confusing, especially to beginners.
>
> If you think that's confusing, just wait til you try to explain that
> unicode snowman means circumfix fromList.
>
> How about,
>
>   >>> let map_with_no_1 = fromList [(5,'a'), (3,'b')]
>   >>> let default_value = 'x'
>   >>> findWithDefault default_value 1 map_with_no_1 == default_value
>   True
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